The Rich Roll Podcast - Preservation, Purpose & Pursuit of the Pacific Crest Trail with Environmentalist Jared Blumenfeld

Episode Date: February 19, 2018

The theme of this podcast is conversations that matter with thought leaders making a difference. My conversation with today's guest perfectly embodies the best of this ethos. A man who has spent the last two decades fighting to create tangible benefits for communities and ecosystems alike, Jared Blumenfeld is a former U.C. Berkeley-trained international environmental lawyer with an impressive resume that includes stints at the Natural Resource Defense Council (NRDC) as well as the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) before running one of San Francisco’s first city Departments focused entirely on the environment, where he was instrumental in helping transform San Francisco into the “greenest city” in America. In 2009, President Obama appointed Jared to serve as Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator for the Pacific Southwest (Region 9), which includes California, Arizona, Hawaii, Nevada, the Pacific Islands, and 148 tribal nations. During his 7-year tenure at EPA, Jared diligently pursued environmental justice and enforcement, focusing on climate change, recycling, tribes, and drinking water. Along the way his team made massive strides in combating corporate polluters, protecting coastal waters, accelerating clean vehicle adoption and advancing tribal community environmental well being. Then, in 2016, he decided to walk away from his career to pursue a life-long dream of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail – an effort to embrace first hand the environment he has spent his life protecting. Jared has appeared frequently in The New York Times, BBC, Economist, San Francisco Chronicle, CNN, Los Angeles Times, NPR and recently launched his own podcast entitled, Podship Earth. As you might imagine,  this is a wide-ranging conversation about planetary preservation and ecological conservation. It's a gut check on the current status of global climate change — what is contributing to it, the challenges faced in combating it, and the responsibility we all share to steward our precious planet towards a greener future. It’s also a very frank redress of our current administration’s attempt to deny reality. Right now, we're facing an indisputably massive and ever growing threat to planetary health. Yet current EPA chief Scott Pruitt's reversal of long-standing environmental policy buttressed by his refusal to embrace scientifically irrefutable facts related to global climate change, poses a very real threat to the long-term well-being of this spaceship we all share called Earth. It's a conversation about what’s required, both on a policy and personal level, to correct past wrongs and steward a healthier, more sustainable path forward. And finally, it’s the story of one man’s remarkable life and his commitment to ensure a better future for us all (plus awesome stories about his four month quest to conquer the Pacific Crest Trail, and how it made him a better human). I really enjoyed this one. I hope you do too. For the visually inclined, you can watch the podcast on YouTube here. Peace + Plants, Rich

Quick announcement before we get into it. I am very excited to announce that Julie and I have a brand new cookbook coming out April 24th. It's called The Plant Power Way Italia. We're very proud of it. If you enjoyed our first book, The Plant Power Way, I think you're going to freak for this one. It's inspired by our retreats in Tuscany and the cuisine of the Italian countryside. It's super next level, incredible photography, 125 entirely new, and of course, delicious plant-based Italian countryside. It's super next level, incredible photography, 125 entirely new, and of course, delicious plant-based Italian recipes. And it's available for pre-order now

from all your favorite online booksellers. You can learn more at richroll.com. Pre-orders are very important to the book's viability. And so it would mean a great deal to us if you reserved your copy today. Thank you so much. I greatly appreciate it. And now on to the show. We're not here to make sure the industry can make more money by polluting. We're here to make sure that industry knows the rules and regulations that are set to

protect public health and the environment. The planet is incredibly special and unique, and it's a gift. And we can't act, firstly, as if we're different than the rest of the planet. I mean, to me, this myth of human superiority is kind of the beginning of the end. Once we think we're better than and different than everything else on the planet, we then have, as you described, this belief in our capacity to have dominion over nature, which is insane. That's Jared Blumenfeld, and this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast.

The theme of this podcast is conversations that matter with thought leaders making a difference. And today we embrace that theme with a person who thoroughly embodies and exemplifies this, a man who has spent his life, his career fighting for environmental change and ecosystem preservation. My name is Rich Roll, and today I sit down with Jared Blumenfeld, a former international environmental lawyer with a resume that includes stints at the NRDC and the International Fund for Animal Welfare, before running one of San Francisco's first city departments focused on the environment, where he was instrumental in helping transform San Francisco into the greenest city in America. From 2009 to 2016, Jared served as EPA Regional Administrator for the Pacific Southwest, which is called Region 9. It includes California, Arizona, Hawaii, Nevada, the Pacific Islands, as well as 148 tribal nations.

And when he was there, he focused on many things, climate change, recycling, environmental justice, clean drinking water, and he made massive strides in combating corporate polluters, protecting coastal waters, accelerating clean vehicle adoption, and advancing tribal community environmental well-being. And then in 2016, he decided to walk away from his career to hike the Pacific Crest Trail to really embrace the environment that he had spent his life protecting. Jared has appeared frequently in the New York Times, the BBC, The Economist, the San Francisco Chronicle, CNN, the Los Angeles Times, NPR. And he recently launched a brand new podcast, his podcast.

It's called Pod Ship Earth, which you can find on Apple Podcasts or at podshipearth.com. This is a really cool one. And there's a few more things I want to say about it before we launch into it. But first we're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide,

to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself. I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery.

To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, Jared. So in the broadest sense, this is a conversation about global climate change, what's contributing to it, the challenges faced in combating it, and the responsibility that I think we all share to steward our precious planet towards a greener, better, brighter future. It's about the current administration's attempt to deny reality, how Scott Pruitt's efforts as EPA head to reverse longstanding environmental policy, as well as his refusal to embrace scientifically irrefutable facts related to global climate change, pose this massive threat to planetary health.

And it's about what is required, both on a policy level as well as a personal level, to right the ship and ensure a better tomorrow. Beyond that, this is also the story of one man's remarkable life and his commitment to ensure a better future for all of us. Plus, we have awesome stories about his four-month quest to conquer the Pacific Crest Trail and how it made him a better human. So without further ado, I give you Jared Blumenfeld. All right, man, you ready to do it? Ready to roll. Let's do it. We were just saying before hitting record that it's a tricky challenge to try to figure out how to embrace the fact and enjoy the fact that it's like 85 degrees out on November, February 5th. Yeah, it's insane.

february 5th yeah it's insane and at the same time recognize the fact that it's bananas yeah i mean trying to be present to the moment and at the same time recognize that the moment is kind of fucked up is is like a dynamic tension so if i'm trying to be in the moment and not be too conscious of what's causing this moment. And yet, it kind of feels like I have my head in the sand if I'm doing that. So yeah, it's an odd tension. Right. And we're living it most aspects of our lives. So maybe we can canvas exactly what is going on that is contributing to this.

Assume somebody who's listening has only the most rudimentary basic sense of global climate change. And perhaps we could do like a laundry list of what exactly is going on and contributing to this situation that we currently face. So human civilization, we like to think of as progress and much of it has led to incredible technological revolutions. It really has transformed the way that we live, that we relate to each other. But about 200 years ago, when the Industrial Revolution started, we found that there was this incredible resource, this energy in a liquid form, gasoline, There was this incredible resource, this energy in a liquid form, gasoline, that basically is very, very condensed organic matter that from the time of the dinosaurs has been sitting there gaining more and more energy. And when you put it in a car or a factory, it runs things.

It's like a miracle. Incredible, right? So it's pretty cool. It runs nearly everything that that we think of the the ships that are coming across from china bringing goods the trains the buses the cars the homes factories all run on fossil fuels the reason they're called fossils is because that's what they are exactly so um when you burn them they produce produce carbon dioxide and we breathe out carbon dioxide. So people who are cynical or don't believe in climate change often say, well, this has happened for millennia.

We've had changes in the climate. And that's true. is that we're causing the change in the climate, which sits uncomfortably with people, especially people who have faith, because they think, how could we insignificant humans really be changing our climate? But we are.

Really the most monumental aspect is the pace of change. When we've had climate variations in the last 100, thousand years, they've happened very slowly. This is happening very dramatically. So the release of greenhouse gases, they're not just carbon, there are other things like your refrigerator has Freon and other coolants that also, actually they do it much much quicker they're about 70 to 100 times more potent than co2 so all these gases are going into the atmosphere and they trap heat so when you think about the rays of the sun coming to us right now nice and warm in this room when it bounces back up

what used to happen is it would bounce back up into space, and a lot of that heat would dissipate into space. Now what happens, because these gases trap the heat, is that it's getting warmer and warmer, and it's leading not just to global warming, which it used to be called, but climate change. A lot of variability. You see the hurricanes that we had, Hurricane Irma. You see what happened from Dallas to Puerto Rico, but it also leads to a lot colder weather. So weather variability is going to become the new norm, very much hotter summers and in some places colder winters. Yeah, it's the frequency of these crazy climatic weather-related events

that we're seeing with just more and more regularity. Yeah. These crazy storms and the impact that they're having on cities. And we're putting Band-Aids on these problems by my observation. Well, the thing is, Rich, people people don't we don't want to confront one of the biggest things in our own lives we don't want to confront is death right people don't talk about death it's not you know even my parents who are in their 80s we're talking to them about doing a will and they're like why would we do a will we've got years to go so no one wants to confront their own death.

So if we're not willing to confront our own death, it's hard to confront something as big as the death of the planet or the death of our ability to live on the planet. So it's a scary thing, right? So I understand why people don't want to talk about it. We also don't want to believe that we have that level of control over our planet. And that if we did have that level of control, that would mean we'd have to take responsibility. And taking responsibility is tough for many people.

Yeah. And we're in the midst of a political climate where there's never been less political will to really wrestle with this in a meaningful way. So like what is going on at the EPA right now with Scott Pruitt and the Trump administration and the rollback of all these initiatives that you were integral in sort of fostering and working on during your tenure? So it's a dark time at EPA. I really want to give a shout out to all the people who are still there in the trenches day after day doing amazing work. We need to send them our support and love. Yeah, it's like that thing where do you stay in and work for change or does that make you,

you know, part of the problem? Like it's a difficult thing. Like I have compassion for somebody who's got to be working there right now thinking, why am I, you know, employed by this administration that stands for everything that I've devoted my life to combat and yet leaving isn't the solution either. Yeah. I think it's about temperament. You know, people need to enjoy what they do. There are people that I talk to that like staying and fighting and doing their job, which to me is an act of resistance. And there are people who are just so depressed, they want to curl up in a ball and, you know, hibernate for the next three years. So depending on your disposition, if you're a fighter and believe that you can make a difference and stay,

you should stay. If you're just miserable, you should probably move on. But what's happening on a larger scale is that there's been this fight that the Republicans started way before Trump. Within the years of the Obama administration, the Republican Congress had already cut EPA's budget by 25%. So huge, huge budget cuts. cut EPA's budget by 25%. So huge, huge budget cuts. So by the time Trump took over, they were already at kind of a very minimal budget, and he now wants to cut it back to really nothing. So the budget is one. The next, which you pointed out, which is even more troubling, is the rollback

of standards. So more than 50 different standards have been rolled back. Some of them, it's just a press headline, and they're not going to actually materialize because the courts and the legal system is going to stop Trump in his tracks. But he's definitely pandering to his base. His base feel like, but for the EPA, but for environmental regulations,

everything would be good. We have jobs, we'd have all this burgeoning manufacturing. You know, unfortunately, what's been ignored is automation, which is the number one job killer in our country. And then the second, which Trump has focused on, is outsourcing that manufacturing to other places. The environment and environmental regulations has had a net huge positive on the American economy because worker productivity is one of the number one things that you look at in terms of the health of the economy. We're sitting here in California. California has the strongest environmental regulations of any state in the union. It also has the strongest economy of any state in the union so this kind of bullshit argument that you know what environmental

regulations are killing jobs we're like a 4.3 unemployment rate right now so it's this it's this sense that i mean pruitt has said sort of famously that the bounty of the earth is here to feed us and fuel us and anything that stands in the way of that needs to be eradicated. And it's really a default to this situation in which, you know, he would like to see the industries that are meant to be policed by the EPA self-regulating each other. We'll defer to them, and we'll let them decide, you know, what's right in our best interest. And it's just amazing to me that this is sort of getting by right now. It's a wake-up call. I think we sat on our laurels too long. We had

an abundance of confidence that the system was working. And the fact that you could have someone like Pruitt, which is really the fox guarding the chicken house, have someone like Pruitt, which is really the fox guarding the chicken house, be the head of EPA, I think was shocking enough. He's very, very skilled. He's like you and I, he's an attorney. He knows what he's doing. He's like a trained assassin. He isn't a bungling fool. Like in Oklahoma, he spent a lot of time suing the EPA, right? Like he's very well versed in the mechanics of how it functions and yeah, he sued EPA 14 times over numerous different regulations Yeah, the state that we're at is

that People when you pull them when you do public opinion surveys, they say yes, we want more environmental protection We want our air to be cleaner. We want our water to be cleaner We want the land to be free of toxins. When you then ask them, do you think it's government's role to put more regulations in place? They say, no, absolutely not. Rich, we don't want that. So you've got this bizarre dichotomy between on the one hand, you want more protection. On the other hand, there's a complete lack of trust in government institutions. So he's, you would think that the person in the role that he is in would care more about the institutions and the rule of law. So, you know, this has become

a very partisan issue. Unfortunately, I have a lot of Republican friends that don't agree with what he's doing. There's a lot of fishermen, there's a lot of hunters that are like, you know what, we need national parks. Why are we shrinking national parks as Trump has proposed to do? So the whole litany of things that are happening, I think, is going to lead to a backlash. It hasn't happened yet. I would have predicted it would have happened a little sooner. But we're kind of in uncharted territory when it comes to to this administration right what's interesting is that the history of environment environmentalism was initially a republican idea i mean it was nixon

who who created the epa and and my sense is that it was sort of born out of perhaps an elitist idea, like we want to preserve where we fly fish. And, you know, we like the views out of our windows where the liberals were coming from a place of thinking, look, we need to use this land for, you know, building lower income housing for poor people. So it was really a Republican ideal that initiated this. And it's interesting how that's flipped. And maybe that has to do with, you know, when did that occur? Like, was that when Al Gore became vice president? I think it's when Al Gore came out with an inconvenient truth. And then it became politicized. Yeah. Originally, I was looking at this. He was

originally slated to do the movie with John McCain. And at some point it became just about alcohol. It became politically untenable for of work to do as a movement. And I actually, I blame myself and the movement in no small measure for getting Trump elected. I think the tone of the environmental movement's real kind of shaming of people, especially in the Rust Belt, for those people's roles in environmental pollution, which they really have, you know, as an individual, people in Michigan, for instance, or Pennsylvania, I

think felt like we're being patronized. We're being talked down to by these elites from these environmental groups. If we don't have a Prius, if we don't live in a green home, if we don't, you know, eat a vegan diet, then we're not good people. And we think we are good people. And so inspiring people as you do, and I'm trying to do around health. This is about health. This isn't about telling someone they should be doing it for a greater cause. Let's start with individual people and what they care about. And we need to just change the tone. Yeah, the elitist veneer that washes over notions related to

wellness, environmentalism, you know, living green, and all of that is not serving the greater good. No, I agree. And it's the people in the Rust Belt, it's the blue collar workers that are well-intentioned and just trying to live their lives that ultimately sort of need these ideas the most or are suffering the most as a result of a lack of understanding

or policies that could enhance their day-to-day sort of general well-being. Yeah, this whole vote against self-interest is a bizarre place that we're in. I mean, many of the people who voted for Trump, it's not in their self-interest in any way, shape, or form. And yet they did it because of a belief that the current system was not helping them. Yeah, the idea that he was going to look out for them, that he was going to bring jobs back from these old sort of outdated sectors

was pushing a button that, you know, they needed to hear. And I don't begrudge them for that. Like, they're suffering and they're having a hard time, and somebody comes along who's breaking ranks, and someone who they feel is speaking to them directly, that's going to activate that sector for sure. To me, it's about getting back to grassroots. That's where politics and environment and all this needs to happen.

It's been so focused on Washington, D.C. that it's become an abstraction. When we were talking at the beginning of the, the hour about what climate change is to most people. It's only real when you equate it back to their situation. If their kid has asthma, if they're, you know, subject to hurricanes that hit more frequently, but making it this big concept of global climate change, that doesn't really mean anything. So we've abstracted notions of the environment to such a degree that it doesn't mean anything to any person. And we need to get back down to a place

where people care about the hills in Malibu because they hike there. People care about Santa Monica Bay because they fish there, not some abstracted notion. And I think EPA is partly to blame. We've become so specialized as a society that individual scientists understand individual parts of much bigger problems. No one's sitting there explaining, this is what's going on. This is how we need to move forward. Yeah, they're not necessarily communicators in the broadest sense. That's not their job. And it seems like there needs to be a new way or a reframing of the vernacular around these ideas so that people can understand and embrace them outside the context of partisan politics. And I think you're right. And to a large extent, that is happening.

Boy Scout groups still collect bottles and cans and get their redemption value. Community groups still clean up pollution in rivers, lakes, and streams in their parks. So at the grassroots level, there's an enormous amount of good stuff happening. And I would encourage people, that's to me, in all my life adventures, that's what I've gotten back down to, which is this is about you, each of us as individuals. And the more it's about large policies

that are driven by science that people don't understand. That could work for a while, while there's a reverence and respect for science. I still have that reverence and respect, but most people would put, you know, a Nobel laureate scientist on the same pedestal as Kim Kardashian. Yeah. But what's interesting about that is, you know, this notion of personal responsibility, that's a conservative, a traditional conservative ideal, like take responsibility, make your own bed, you know, and the greater good is elevated by the result of you, you know, sort of mining your own P's and Q's. believe in in minding my own p's and q's in that i think what we've lost is people knowing who their neighbors are people building community and valuing community as opposed to the individuality that exists with my relationship with my iphone that's not community watching tv is not community so getting i was just gardening the other day and i met every single

one of my neighbors because i was out on the street talking to people as opposed to in my home and just sitting on a stoop people don't do that so we may never get back to that place but i'm not suggesting that um this this ideal of retreating into oneself. But basically, we are the way that we experience the planet. The planet is incredibly special and unique. And it's a gift. And we can't act, firstly, as if we're different than the rest of the planet. I mean, to me, this myth of human superiority is kind of the beginning of the end. Once we think we're better than and different than

everything else on the planet, we then have, as you described, this belief in our capacity to have dominion over nature, which is insane. Well, and history tells us well that every time we try to outwit nature, nature ultimately in the long run gets the best of us. And how much longer do we have to, yeah, exactly. Like when are we gonna finally get that and try to live in a way that's more copacetic with the ebbs and flows of what the planet requires?

I don't think we will and I don't mean that in a are you are you are you pessimistic that speaks to your overall perspective on whether we can win this war or not I mean I I like to think of myself as an optimist um I now I mean both those terms optimist andist, kind of have an inherent in them a belief in a eventuality that something either positive will happen or negative. For me, I don't see a lot of evidence that, you know, I started doing international environmental law. So I thought the way forward was these big treaties, like the one that Trump pulled out of the Paris Agreement. Right. So when you look at those agreements, most of the countries, we had one, we had the Kyoto Protocol, which was meant to

curtail greenhouse gas emissions. It had strict criteria and reduction targets. They weren't met. criteria and reduction targets, they weren't met. When you look at nearly any treaty of its kind, they, you know, they're not that, they don't have a good track record. So I'm looking for what are the signs of positive growth for me are areas like the organic food movement, for instance, where it relates to people's own individual health and well-being, where there's a direct nexus between them and the environment. That's where I see improvement. That's where I want to focus. Yeah, it seems like changing habits and human nature or attitudes around these issues are going to be best driven by changes in people's specific environments that contribute to making the better choice as opposed to the easy lazy choice that that is creating harm

yeah for me i saw that your wife did a book on dairy-free cheese like i'm lactose intolerant. So when I eat or consume milk, I feel crap. I feel terrible. So it isn't, you know, I, I, um, I became kind of an accidental vegan because my wife, when we moved in together was a vegetarian and I just started not eating meat. If you try and eat meat five years later, it really, your system can't do it, right? So I never made any particular choice to go down this path. My daughter then became gluten-free. So now I'm like, wow, how did I end up doing all this? But these are decisions that are consistent

with your values though, because when you look at the impact of animal agriculture on planetary health, it's pretty dire. But but so rich this is exactly the conversation that so if we analyze this conversation i don't think you're going to convince more than five percent of the population to stop eating meat because of the massive impacts that dairy and other agriculture have on you know just industrial agriculture generally have a devastating impact on the planet. That's not going to convince anyone. But if you say, look how good rich looks, you know, look how good I feel, and you help someone do that, I think they're going to change

and keep that change. Like, I'm not going to ever go back to drinking milk because it makes me feel terrible now. I'm not supposed to drink milk. So allowing people to, one, understand how they feel. And I think many people have lost touch, have just become numb, cynical, unable to understand and really value how they feel. And then you start eating fried food with that knowledge and it just tastes fucking nasty. So they don't do it anymore as opposed to you should not eat meat because it's bad for the planet. Yeah, I get that. I get that distinction. But I think environmentally we can create, you know, how do we foster the organic food movement so that it can impact more people and the people that need it the most, which is the lower socioeconomic class that either can't afford it or access it right now? And to me, that happens through local urban gardening and programs that start with kids in schools and education and all of these things that get people interested.

kids in schools and education and all of these things that get people interested. And in a communal sense, you were talking about like being gardening in your front yard. It seems like every city, every urban landscape should proliferate with urban gardens where people can grow their own food and have access to organic produce and create an opportunity for their kids to learn about that connection between the foods they're eating and health because these are the people that are suffering the greatest from these chronic ailments that are just killing millions of people 100 agree huge advocate of community agriculture and i once had the cool job of being the director of the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department. And the number one thing that people came up to me thanking me for was not how great Golden Gate Park looked.

It was thank you so much for having that community garden. I was sitting six years on a wait list. Now I'm in. Just getting your hands in the dirt, all those microbes, just the feeling of being out and doing what we're supposed to do, which is be connected to nature and then being able to show the kids that connection. The green schools movement is an amazing, positive example of what can be done. Tearing out the asphalt and putting in community gardens for flowers, for food. In my kid's public school in San Francisco, they did that at rooftop and they had a garden teacher and she was amazing. And it just motivated the kids to, even though they're in the middle of a dense city,

to think about nature in a different way. So for all the people out there who are doing that, keep doing it. You're awesome. Yeah, it's amazing. But the idea that you would have to be on a wait list for six years, that's insane, right? It should be something that's accessible to everybody, especially in densely populated areas. I know there's some cool stuff happening in Oakland with this. There's cool stuff. Yeah. In LA and Oakland, all over the country, cool stuff. Yeah. In L.A., in Oakland, all over, all over the country. Cool stuff is happening, but it takes. OK, so this is exactly the emphasis I think is important, which is we are so frigging distracted by Trump and national politics, which does not bear really on how many community gardens they're going to be.

really on how many community gardens they're going to be. And yet you go to these meetings, as I did, to suggest that there'd be more community gardens in poorer communities. No one from national environmental groups shows up. No one. Five or six members of the community show up because they're all watching Trump on some crazy Fox News thing. They're not there in the community. So we need people to put down their TVs, their phones, give up this idea that they're gonna be able to change Trump, get less anxiety in their life by doing so, and go to these community meetings and say, yeah, we can transform our community. One of the great ways of doing it

is by putting in community gardens. Right. In other words, stop spending so much of your time and resources and energy in things you can't control. Exactly. Let's take a look at what we can actually change. Yep. Yeah. So how did you get interested in the environment to begin with?

I grew up in a small village in England called Grantchester with two American parents. So my number one question is, how could you be an EPA if you have an English accent? I know. Okay, you can grow up in another country and be a U.S. citizen. And every morning the cows would go in front of our house to the meadows. And for me, the most liberating thing was the bicycle. So it was a very flat part of England. Me and my friends from like six years old

would just go out into the fields on our bikes, on these farm roads and go for miles and miles. And that sense of liberation and freedom connected to the environment was really important. And so that triggered something. Like, did you know then, like, this is what I want my life to be about? Or when did the lights go on? Like, this is a career that I could pursue.

So the next thing that I did was take photographs of trees. So that was my passion when I was maybe 11 through 16. And then my grandmother was this very, very boisterous, feisty lady, and I would argue all the time. And she was like, Jared, you should go to law school. I'd never even thought about being a lawyer. She was a child psychologist, so maybe she was just kind of pushing me,

thinking reverse psychology. But I ended up going to law school and doing human rights law. You went to Berkeley for law school? Yeah, and at Berkeley, at the time it was just leading up to the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, which was the first time,

the largest gathering at its time of heads of state that had ever happened in human history to come together for the environment and george bush senior was there um and even signed the climate change convention at the time so it just shows how much has changed even since 92 anyway they asked me um and this friend laurie to do a report for the sierra club Legal Defense Fund on the relationship between human rights and the environment. If your environment is so destroyed by an oil company or logging, do you have a cause in an international court to say that your human rights have been violated? And what it showed was that every constitution, new constitution that has either been written or changed since 1976 included this clause of a right to a healthy environment.

So ours is one of the few constitutions that doesn't have any rights to a healthy environment. So interesting. Yeah. interesting yeah so that leads you into ultimately into city politics in san francisco then yeah i never thought i'd become a city bureaucrat i'm kind of accidental vegan and an accidental bureaucrat so i know i i ran an accidental podcaster now. Exactly. No, now you're forcing me, Rich. Rich has me tied down. I've been in this cabin for four weeks. The only way I could get out was to do a podcast. No. So I started just in terms of people listening. I wouldn't recommend going right into city government. If you care about the environment, think about what you can do locally i work for

environmental groups the first one was this group called the natural resources defense council and then this group called the international fund for animal welfare and the funnest biggest campaign that we ran um was actually the last time i was in malibu was with pierce brosnan in in like 98 or something we ran ran this campaign to stop Mitsubishi from building a salt factory twice the size of Washington, D.C. in this beautiful place called Laguna San Ignacio. So fighting corporate evils was how I kind of got my teeth sharpened.

And then I got this job in San Francisco with Willie Brown. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's a character, that guy. He is. I mean, that guy's got a lot of swagger. He's amazing. And if you shake his hand, I saw him a few days ago, he's got a hand of steel. He works out every day, two or three hours, he told me.

He keeps a very strict diet. I mean, he's in his early 80s, but he looks in his late 60s. He's sort of a man born out of time, too. I feel like he would have flourished in the 1920s. He's very much a bon vivant. Yeah. I love Willie. He's a classic. So he appoints you, and you got to work. You made a pretty significant impact on a lot of measures in San Francisco. I read read, like recycling went from 46% to somewhere in the high 70s or something like that.

So what were you doing? So yeah, when you think about environment, so cities, so in 2005, for the first time in human history, the majority of people on the planet live in urban areas. So as a civilization as a species We spent most of our time as farmers in wild places then in farms Now we live in cities. So 50% of the world's humanity lives in cities 85% of the world's pollution comes from cities

So some of these legal instruments that I had kind of looked at and studied in law school, they don't really apply to cities. And yet cities are where the action is at. So in San Francisco, we basically came up with this theory that if we can't come up with environmental ordinances and regulations in San Francisco, where else in the world are they going to be able to do it? Yeah, it's got to start there, right? Of all places. Yeah, an obligation rather. So we're kind of zany. So we came out with this goal in 2001 to get to zero waste by 2020. The people who were implementing it phoned me the other day. They're like, Jared, what the fuck? How could you come out zero waste by 2020 were you nuts like we needed a goal right we shouldn't be sending stuff to landfill or incineration waste to me is a design flaw like why do we have waste as a society

we don't need to if we design things better so we did we we were the first city to do curbside collection of food scraps to turn into compost. So more than 500 tons a day of food scraps are turned into organic compost in San Francisco. Didn't composting become like a legal mandate? Yeah. So once you set a goal, which I'd encourage everyone in their life, in their business, in their cities to do. So zero waste to landfill by 2020 means you need to work with everyone, the businesses, the recycling companies, and come up with a plan. How are you going to do this?

So what we realized is at some point, voluntary efforts, they'll get you pretty far. They got us to 70% recycling. You're not going to get to 80%. So we went to Gavin Newsom, who then became the mayor, said, They'll get you pretty far. They got us to 70% recycling. You're not going to get to 80%. So we went to Gavin Newsom, who then became the mayor, said, Gavin, we need to get to 80%, 90% in the next 10 years. We can only do it if we make these things mandatory. And people kind of freaked out. We also then looked at what is the stuff that's still going to landfill

that can't be recycled so plastic bags styrofoam we like we need to ban that and i'm not you know you don't there's a lot of things that don't need to be banned but some things do plastic bags are one of them we had a huge fight with the plastic bag industry but it kind of inspired people to if we can do this rich in these communities and now as a state then the the rest of the nation can say, you know what, it is possible. We actually can do it. The same has been true with solar power. The same has been true with many different initiatives.

If California can do it and make it affordable, the rest of the nation will follow. It's been true of electric vehicles. Well, it's certainly true of plastic bags. I mean, as audacious as that may have sounded at the time, I mean, you guys were the first to put that in motion. And now there's a cascading effect of that. Like that's now everyone sort of understands and accepts that plastic bags are bad. And you know, I don't know how the laws look across the country, but, you know, you see fewer and fewer of them for sure. And people always say, you know what, Jared, this is absurd.

Why focus on one little thing like the plastic bag? But we want to be able to show that we can make a difference. No one needs plastic bags. And it's important to have those victories. As an environmental community, we're very, very focused on these are the problems. The victories, we also need to savor and realize, you know, for instance, in San Francisco, we had legislation that all buildings, every single building have to now be LEED, which is a green building standard, gold. Wow. You mean every new building that's built or all buildings that exist?

All new buildings that are built. And if you level the playing field, people sign up. They say, you know what? We want to build green and we have to build green, so we will. So people are just looking. Back to the Pruitt example, you know what? We're not here to make sure the industry can make more money by polluting. We're here to make sure that industry knows the rules and regulations that are set to protect public health and the environment. And that balance has coexisted for a long time. And I met with industry upon industry when I was at EPA. And most of them, I would say 90 to 95 percent, want to do the right thing. But if you come to them and say, Rich, we can cut all these environmental regulations. Are you in they'll be like sure

Yeah, we're gonna make a bit more money But it's not sustainable in the long term and and the sustainability movement in large corporations even large corporations like Walmart and Apple They're they're here for to stay and they when Trump was suggesting that we pull out of Paris, were like, why would you do that? Are you crazy? So industry, by and large, is for environmental protection. Yeah, it's in their long-term interest. I mean, you can make short-term profits, short-term gains by cutting corners.

But I think we're in this very transparent culture now. in this very transparent culture now. The internet has afforded us the tools to really understand how corporate America functions in a way that wasn't possible 10, 15 years ago even. And I think we have a maturing generation of millennials who care very much about these things. And they wanna patronize the companies that they know are paying attention

to these sorts of things. So to the extent that a company can be a little bit more profitable in the short run, ultimately, you know, we can trust on the flow of information to let people know who's doing well, who isn't. And I think we have a groundswell of interest in the consumer base that really wants to patronize the companies that are doing well and reward them So I think it is in you know, it is it is very much in in an entity's capitalistic long-term interest to get on board with these ideals a Great example of that is the no GMO label on the Fairtrade label Which haven't been legislated voluntary. Yeah, it is voluntary. But when you read it, one, do people really want to eat food that has GMOs in it?

Not really. The labeling, I think, has actually gone beyond most people's expectations. It would have been great if we could have outlawed some GMOs and really given a boost to fair trade. But those labels are doing a great job. And consumers, as you said, they want to buy into those values and know that the products that they're consuming have a value proposition that they can buy into.

Right. Back to the plastic bag thing. The plastic bag, to me, is sort of symbolic. It's as a representative of single use items in general. And this seems to be, you know, really one of the biggest problems, our sort of disposable culture, whether it's a bottled water or a plastic bag or, you know, a cup at Starbucks, whatever, whether they're recyclable or not, plastic, paper, whatever, we're just indoctrinated that we can just buy something, use it once, and throw it away. And we're just sitting on top of just inconceivable amounts of waste. So how are we, you know, how can we move

forward from this gigantic problem? I mean, the bag thing is a huge victory, and you're seeing that. But like, what about bottled water huge victory and you're seeing that, but like, what about bottled water, for example, or what are the other things that are contributing to this problem and, you know, the gigantic Pacific garbage patch and, you know, all of these issues that we now have to contend with? Yeah, it's kind of insurmountable, but the way to do it is small piece at a time. So back in the 1970s, the environmental movement was kind of founded on the three R's, reduce, reuse, recycle. We focus a lot of our attention on recycling.

So when you go and meet with Arrowhead or Nestle, they'll tell you the single-use bottles, Rich, they're recyclable. The problem is that a billion of them a year end up in landfill on beaches in California. So they may be recyclable, but do you need them in the first place? So we kind of have become slaves to this concept of convenience. If you get takeout food, you're going to get the straw, you're going to get the cutout food, you're gonna get the straw, you're gonna get the cutlery, you're gonna get all these things you really don't need because you have them in your house and yet they keep coming. So I think the next big trend is for ordinances Alameda County which is where

Berkeley and Oakland are up in Northern California, just passed an ordinance to have an opt-in for straws. So rather than getting a straw that's plastic with a wrapper on it, you have to ask someone for a straw. And just that single act of rather than being given it automatically, asking someone is actually, I think, a really positive move. The other thing that San Francisco is looking at is both fees. If you want to get a Starbucks cup and you can't be bothered to bring your own, you should maybe pay more. And then the last thing is requiring some kind of reuse option. So if you're getting food for a delivery service like caviar,

they should probably provide an option. One, that you have to opt in for the straws, the cutlery and all that stuff. But more importantly, that there's an option for a tray that you put the food in that they take back. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That would be great. And it doesn't seem like that big of a deal to kind of put that in motion. I'm working on it. You are. That's good. So there's some really cool things happening with the zero waste movement right now.

I was meant to just last week have this woman on who goes by Trashes for Tossers on the Internet. I like it. Yeah, she's cool. You have to have grown up in England to know why that's funny. Although I don't think she's not British, though. She lives in New York, and she's got four years of her waist in one mason jar. You could also have waist is for wankers. No, that would be good, too.

That would be the male version of her. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so she has four years going, and all of her. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so she like has four years going and all of her waste is in one mason jar. And, you know, she sort of blogs and vlogs about like how to live a zero waste lifestyle and opened this store in Brooklyn called Package Free Shop where you need to bring your own,

you just, everything is in bulk and in bins, right? So you bring in your own stuff and you can refill and, you know, all of that. And she shows you how to make your own shampoo just everything is in bulk and in bins right so you bring in your own stuff and you can refill and you know all of that and she shows you how to make your own shampoo and all that kind of stuff and that's another thing that i think it's awesome i love that it's very cool yeah and it's it's very much a millennial thing i think but it's also goes back to that point you referenced earlier which is to expect that i mean it's inspiring to see that you can do that and it makes you think more about the waste that you generate, but how many people are actually going to adopt that lifestyle, which most people would look at as very aesthetic and challenging versus creating, whether it's regulations or just simply an environment that's more conducive to

creating less waste and disposing of less waste. Yeah, regulations have gotten a bad name. I just think of them as standards or rules that help reduce pollution. I mean, I spent a lot of time looking at the Pacific garbage patch. I flew out to Midway Island. I've talked to scientists in Hawaii. It's twice the size of Texas between here and Hawaii I heard it was the size of Texas

twice the size of Texas and the plastic gets smaller and smaller and it ends up in teeny little beads that replicate plankton the fish then eat the plastic the plastic not only is just there, which is bad, but within the ocean it creates kind of a magnified impact and sucks in toxins within the ocean.

So they become very toxic. The fish, when you do the liver samples, it looks like they've been drinking whiskey for the last 60 years. I mean, they're in really bad shape. And for what? So that we can have a straw in our Pepsi. Could we just not drink it in a glass that can go into a dishwasher? I mean, yeah, I agree with you. We're not, the movement needs people like the no packaging store in Brooklyn because we need to understand what is possible. But it isn't going to be the whole answer. Right.

Have you seen the patch yourself? Have you flown on it? So it's a bit of a myth in that. It's like a goo, right? It's not like floating garbage. It's very, very different sized pieces of plastic. If you can imagine a Tide bottle, you know, the first year you have a Tide bottle, it's going to look pretty much like that. The next year, it's going to go into a few pieces.

Ten years from now, it's going to be a lot of small red-orange pieces of plastic. And it's going to continue going down into the water column so you can find pieces of plastic 60 feet down in the water column all the way to the surface so it isn't a blanket surface of plastic that you can see i work with um nasa and this guy pete warden who ran aims to is there a way of flying over and getting UV or other infrared and bouncing it to see where the plastic is, and you can't. The way that they measure it is by on boats they have a pole, basically a sieve that they drag along behind them,

and you can see where the concentration levels are, and that's how they came up with twice the size of Texas. Is there any strategy for dealing with this thing? So there's basically three strategies. One is upstream. So if you think about how we design products, we're just talking about it, how you design products that have less waste inherently in them. Like we've all received those little SIM cards in blister packs

that are huge. Like what happens to all that plastic? Why do we need all that plastic? So design stuff with zero waste in mind. Then second, actually LA is a world leader on, which is stopping the plastic from going in from the streets into the storm drains into the ocean that that's kind of the number one inflection point if you don't stop it going down the drain it's going to end up in the ocean so la has put in all kinds of cool devices to capture the plastic um and then the third is to go out and actually collect it and And there's some noble efforts going on. There's a young Dutchman who's working on this. So there's some cool efforts.

There's a lot more money, unfortunately, being spent on the idea of cleanup than there is prevention. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Isn't there some really young kid I was just reading about, like a 16-year-old kid who figured out, some wizard who figured out how to decompose this in a yeah we love we love inventions and cool stuff and and so he's attracting a lot of um bjorn bork i think his name is um anyway it's very cool i wish him all the best luck we there's about 10 million tons of plastic a year that's being added to the pacific garbage

patch so our main goal should be doing all three it's like an all of the above strategy if we just focus on cleanup you know a terrifying thing that i found when i was in taiwan is that they built all their landfills right on the ocean front and now with rising sea levels because of climate change, these huge landfills are being washed into the ocean. So another thing which I think is fairly commonsensical is maybe we should have an international agreement to not build landfills within a mile of the ocean. Yeah, how does that even happen?

That's amazing. Well, I think, you know, in a broader sense, it speaks to human beings kind of default kind of expectation that technology is going to innovate us out of all the problems that we create for ourselves. whether it's Elon Musk getting us to Mars so we can just punt on this planet. Like the idea of terraforming Mars, like, oh, that's awesome. Well, why don't we terraform the Earth? Like if we have that technology, can't we use that here and like protect what we're actually doing? Rather than saying, well, we're just going to rifle through all of this and we'll figure it out later. It's like, you know, this is not working for us. Yeah, I have a very complex relationship

with technology in that for instance if you look at solar cells um back in 1979 it cost 80 dollars to produce a watt of energy now it's about 55 cents so technology has allowed us to capture this renewable resource, the sun and wind and battery storage is going to allow us to keep it in our homes and use it when we need it. So there are elements of technology which are really useful. Electric cars, for instance, are a complex one. I live in San Francisco. We can't have any more cars. It doesn't matter if it's a hydrogen fuel cell car or a hybrid.. I live in San Francisco. We can't have any more cars. It doesn't matter what, you know, if it's a hydrogen fuel cell car or a hybrid,

it doesn't make any difference. There's no room for cars. And those cars take a lot of energy to produce, a lot of energy to deconstruct, and they kill a lot of people. So maybe walking, like I was always like, why is no one promoting walking and bicycling? And cities are now doing that. Because that's not as sexy as a Tesla S.

Exactly. It isn't. But you get sexier by doing them. Right. And I read you walk five miles or you were walking five miles to and from work every day. When I decided to do this, to leave work and do the Pacific Crest Trail, I needed to practice. Right. Practice your walking.

Yeah. We do. I mean, we were designed to walk, right? Yeah. We're not designed to sit on our ass and get fat. We're designed to walk. Basically, that's why we stand on two feet, unlike other animals. So we're designed to walk.

I love walking. Why isn't solar more ubiquitous? I was reading yesterday that there's a hundred trillion dollars of stranded assets that the old status quo energy companies have. Namely, they built power plants that are running on coal, even natural gas, that solar, if it were as ubiquitous as you and I would like, would mean they are paying for a stranded asset that doesn't get money in. So these big utilities that you hear saying lots of good things, even in our state, they have a very strong interest to continue their power plants going. So, you know, the price of new power,

I don't think anyone in the United States, no matter what Trump says, is going to build a new coal-fired power plant. Coal is just too expensive. And the reason it's too expensive, unfortunately, is fracking. So fracking, you know, the upside of fracking is that it put coal out of business. The bad side is that it has very significant environmental impact. So solar now is competitive.

And that's a fantastic thing. Unfortunately, Trump put tariffs on Chinese imports of solar panels. put tariffs on Chinese imports of solar panels, there are more people involved in installing solar now in America than there are coal miners. So irrespective of regulations, I mean, this has to be the future. It is the future. Right. Whether the coal and gas companies like it or not,

solar is the future, as with other renewable energy like wind. And I would imagine with the advances in the batteries that we're seeing right now, that it's got to be even way more effective now what they're capable of doing even compared to a couple of years ago. I was just in a new Chevy Bolt. They have the Volt and the Jolt and the Bolt. They get kind of confusing. It's actually a cool little car and it has a 320 mile range. A few years ago, the first one, the Volt had like a 60 mile range. So the battery technology is taking it. Yeah, it's crazy. It doesn't make sense to me at all, like why anybody would build combustion engine cars at all anymore. It just doesn't seem to be, it's not the future.

Yeah, the head of GM went to China. I think she was expecting to be able to convince them that internal combustion engines, the normal gasoline engines were still part of a future mix. She came back and said, no. Right. still part of a future mix she came back and said no right yeah electric vehicles for gm everyone else is is here to stay it's our future it seems that in certain respects china is sort of leading the way they are and they aren't i mean they they have a a very um disciplined central command government so when they decide to do something like high-speed rail, it just gets done. When we decide we're going to do high-speed rail,

as we did 10 years ago in California, nothing gets done very quickly. 50 years later, we're still talking about it. Exactly, which is unfortunate. I wish I could have taken the train down here in two hours. So the thing that they're doing right is they're moving in the right direction. They still have a very, very high reliance on old cheap coal, which burns very dirtily.

Most of that coal is in manufacturing products that we buy. So one of the things I thought would be cool at some point is to have a label that shows you the energy source of the product that you're buying. So, you know, we kind of buy it blindfolded and think, oh, you know what, I'm not exactly sure where this was made, but I'm sure if I bought it on Amazon, it must be good. It's probably coming from China, made in a factory with a lot of coal energy shipped here you know a huge amount of california's pollution still is from cargo ships coming from china right that has very very high sulfur fuel yeah it seems like there should be the equivalent of a nutrition fax panel on every consumer product that explains to you the the carbon footprint of the creation and distribution,

the shipping of that product. Let's do it, Rich. Yeah. I mean, the cool thing about California, so we have Jerry Brown, an amazing guy. I love our current governor. I think we're likely to have Gavin Newsom as our next governor.

Most likely. And if you put those standards in place in California, a state with 40 million people and the fifth largest economy on the planet, it doesn't really matter what Washington, D.C. says. It doesn't really matter what Trump says. If you can get it done in Sacramento, it's going to happen around the country because they're not going to put that. They're not going to take that panel with all that environmental information off it on the ones that they sell in Nevada or North Dakota or Massachusetts. It's going to be the same exact product.

So I think a lot of thinking needs to be done about how we leverage California even more than we have already to get environmental change in the entire country. Right, because California really is the ultimate test case for not just the rest of the country, but the rest of the world, because there is so much sensibility around these issues. Absolutely. And I mean, people live in this state because they like the outdoors, because they want to spend time nearly year round being able to run and hike and swim. And so that's a certain group of people. Those people vote. Those people are going to vote for more environmental protections. And that's why you

have the state. People often ask me, why is California so green? It's a self-selecting group of people that live here. And, you know, I love living here. I love living here. So after your tenure with the city, you're appointed to the EPA by Obama to basically run, what is it called, Region 9, Section 9? Yeah, District 9. District 9. That was the movie about a South African with a claw.

Yeah, the dystopian future. Exactly, yeah. That's why I told close friends and family I'd been. It's District 9 was a movie about a South African with a claw. Yeah, the dystopian future. Yeah, that's why I told close friends and family I'd been. It's District 9. It's Region 9. Yeah. It was California, Arizona, Nevada, Hawaii, and Pacific Islands. And what was your charge?

Like, what was that job all about? So that job, if you go back to something you mentioned earlier, so back in the 70s, Richard Nixon, unbelievably, created the Environmental Protection Agency. It is wild that it was Nixon, isn't it? Yeah. What was going on? What motivated him to do that? A lot of it, also reflecting back on what we just said, came from California. So California was going ahead and saying, particularly LA, the air is so bad. We need to do something about this. And people around the country, it was a grassroots movement.

They're like, screw this. Like, unless DC does something, we're going to do it ourselves. And they were doing it themselves. And it got to this point where the president, you know, we had the first Earth Day rally in April 22nd 1970 there were demonstrations around the country This was a big big political issue and actually is kind of relates to China in China

This is a very big political issue people cannot breathe and the middle class is growing and growing and growing and they're like This will become such a big issue that the Chinese politicians are worried that it will topple them. So that's why they're tackling it. And the same was true in the US in the 1970s. So the job really was to implement the big environmental statutes that Congress passed. So Congress and the president passed the Clean Air Act. that Congress passed. So Congress and the president passed the Clean Air Act. It's then up to EPA working with, in this case, the state of California or Nevada or Arizona to implement it.

And that means, you know, one of the most important things is getting the science right. So science is not a belief system, right? It is the world outside that can be measured and that measurement can be repeated. You'll get the same answer. So science is incredibly important to the environmental protection of our planet. We need to know exactly how good is the air, how good is the water. If the contaminants going into the air and water that we can't see doesn't mean they're not going to hurt us. A lot of what we can't see hurts us very badly. So we would do enforcement actions. We would take actions against polluting companies.

We're involved, for instance, in the big case against VW, who had a whole scandal of, you know, their emissions testing requirements. Right, I remember that. So we kept people honest i always saw us as the environmental cop on the beat and that cop is no longer on the beat and that that's something that worries me so whether it's a big oil refinery in torrents that might blow up has blown up if it's you know the the big gas leak that you had um just a years ago in Southern California, EPA and other agencies are there to, one, stop it, two, clean it up, and then three, hold those polluters accountable.

So the rule of law, science, and transparency were kind of the most important things to me. And that's when you asked if I had heartburn. That's what gives me heartburn now. We have no idea what EPA is doing. It's all behind closed doors. They're not talking to the scientists, the people with real knowledge. There was recently a pesticide that had gone through years and years of review, chlorpyrifos, and the staff brought it up to Pruitt and said,

we should delist this. And he's like, like no we're going to keep it on the shelves right it'd been established that it was harming children exactly but and not I mean people need to realize that uh by science we're talking about peer-reviewed science this isn't one study that one person did. This is academic studies that have been done, replicated, in many cases, by very prestigious universities, and then are reviewed by an independent federal panel and then go to EPA. So by the time we got them, this wasn't— So vetted. Yes. And it's not conjecture at this point. It's not—I never saw it as really any discretion.

I wasn't there to say, I'm a better scientist than they are i mean pruitt is not a scientist by his own admission and yet to just throw that science away and say yeah yeah maybe hurting kids maybe hurting kids rich but we really need to look out for the chemical companies i mean what about them i mean it was so it's. It's absolutely insane. Meanwhile, he built this crazy soundproof office for $25,000. I mean, this guy's bananas. Yeah, he also spent $200,000 on a contract to go through EPA employees' emails

to look at those that were disloyal to Trump. Oh, my God. I mean, if you read about it in a, in a dystopian, you know, novel, you'd be like, yeah, I mean, they get, no one's going to do that kind of shit. So yeah, it's crazy town. So thank God we're here in Malibu. Yeah. So anyway, all right.

So you're at EPA and you're, you were very much from what I understand, like a boots on the ground guy. Like you're showing up at the wetlands with your boots on. You're at these mines, you know, firsthand. I love being outside, yeah. Yeah. I didn't want to be in the office. What was the sort of, you know, craziest thing that you saw that even you thought, like, I can't even believe this is happening? There's so much. Oh my God.

Actually, I spent a lot of time at the U.S.-Mexico border. And because we're Americans, we generally think that things run from north to south. But all the rivers on the U.S.-Mexico border run from south to north. And I was in, there's this border town, Calexico and Mexicali. So in Mexicali, it's about a town of a million people. They had abattoirs having pure blood effluent going into rivers that then went into the US, then went into the Salton Sea. Just, I have these pictures of these flows of blood

and like like animal blood like we just from their cattle industry or from runoff from slaughter houses as a slaughterhouse yeah so a slaughterhouse so this is a big flow of just imagine like putrid blood coming out of a pipe going to a river and then talking to the congress people on the u.s side and saying you know what we need a joint task force to look at how we can do this they're like why would why would we care about what's happening in mexico well the mexican pollution is coming into the u.s but um you know the other the other big, just looking at mining, the mining operations, that gold ring that we have on our fingers takes tons and tons and tons and tons of digging and ore. Just the footprints, the scale of these mining operations is just mind boggling. Yeah. I mean, what about the minerals in our iPhone?

Yeah, God, you don't even want to go there because they come from the Congo and places where, if you ever saw the Blood Diamond movie, yeah, it's not a pretty picture. And frankly, to me, if you look at san diego and then tijuana that is the difference that environmental regulation makes that's the most graphic example that i've ever seen there's a border the thing that makes america great is partly our environmental protections that's what the quality of life that we enjoy,

that we can breathe the air, that you can turn on the faucet and get water that you drink. We have spent billions of dollars to allow that. So back to the earlier point, if you can drink this incredible water out of the tap, why are we buying a bottle of water covered in plastic that's been sitting in a shelf? That water quality is terrible.

Yeah, because we've been led to believe through some very convincing marketing tactics that it's pure, that it has a special mineral content that's better for us, or any number of factors that would lead us to purchase a bottle of water that's in a plastic bottle that comes from some Polynesian island that had to travel 5,500 miles to get here. Yeah. So just realize it's a luxury. But I think there's a public mistrust of tap water.

You probably know more about tap water than almost anyone. I know a lot about tap water. Do you? So let's talk about tap water. You probably know more about tap water than almost anyone. I know a lot about tap water. Do you? So let's talk about tap water. Okay. Tap water, other than federal highway system, the second largest investment of federal dollars is in our drinking water infrastructure. So the standards for drinking water are set scientifically. They are very, very rigorous. And there are communities that don't meet them. And EPA takes action against those. And the state of California and other states also take action.

So it's very highly monitored. The standards are very high. When it comes to bottled water, that isn't true. So unfortunately, tests have been done and the Food and Drug Administration oversees bottled water, not EPA, and the standards that they use are much lower. So the phthalates, the PCBs, all the issues of plastic that we wouldn't want to leach in our drinking water, if it sits there for a long time can become an issue bpa so i i am always much more comfortable drinking tap water than i am bottled water and we've paid for that system if someone told you that you could get a glass of water for a fraction of one cent, or you could pay $2 for that same glass. Just from a

fiscal responsibility, the drinking water companies want to sell you on this. Like 20 years ago, people would have frigging laughed in your face, Rich. Rich, I'm going to sell you this bottle of water. You'd be like, what? A bottle of water? You're trying to sell this to me? But I think it speaks to an erosion of trust in government. And when I see what Pruitt is up to, and I see how he just sort of allowed this pesticide that's been established to harm children, he's made it permissible for use. Well, those pesticides, you know, are in our farmland, and then there's runoff. And then, you know, that runoff leads to our water table and our rivers and ultimately our drinking water. I just had a guy here on the podcast last week who was talking about the extent to which glyphosate is basically ubiquitous

everywhere because its use is so profligate that it's in our rain. And then even on organic farms, it's raining into the soil. And then this ends up in our drinking water. And so there's a, like, and me not knowing anything, I'm like, all right, well, how much of these pesticides are actually ending up in our drinking water? Is my drinking water laced with glyphosate, even to the smallest extent, or some other cocktail of pesticides?

And that lack of knowing and distrust that's compounded by you know what i'm seeing going on in government right now that motivates me to buy bottled water right yeah and there's a lot of people pushing you in that direction just from a marketing perspective i mean there's billions of dollars that are spent on marketing beverages and none that's spent on telling you the benefits of drinking water. So it's not an even playing field. And I completely agree with you

that the erosion of trust in government has made people think, you know what? We had Flint, Michigan. Government was there and that drinking water was completely contaminated. And it was- And that problem water was completely contaminated and it was and that problem is still not solved no it's still not solved and in California a million people today will go without access to water that meets federal drinking water standards they're mainly

in the San Joaquin Valley in the Coachella Valley but those people deserve the same level of drinking water that all of us deserve. So, yeah, there's a lot of, it's complex being alive in 2018 because there's so many confounding and often contradictory pieces of information and no one knows what to do with it. And to me, the only answer is to just live more simply. From a drinking water perspective, you do need to know what's in it. And you can find out because we live in a country where that data is available. So you can find out from your local water utility,

are there any issues of concern that I should be aware of? And they will tell you. And if your water utility is doing a good job, they should be telling you anyway. So what were some of the victories that you had during your time at EPA? I think the main victories were getting people to believe that the system was there for them, especially poorer people. There's this concept, unfortunately, of environmental injustice.

So when you do a search by zip code of where people live, where poor minority people live in our country is where all the worst environmental contamination is. And really, the only ways to address that is one focus on enforcement. Make sure the companies clean up their act and Secondly give money to those communities to help them become the next solar Leaders, so there's a belief that that's kind of, unfortunately, by the facts that if you're poor and you want to get into solar or you want to get a job at Tesla, you're going to be the last one to do it.

Right. And so helping the next generation of people who need the help most get it first was really, I think, the biggest victory of helping empower those communities. Yeah, I know you worked a lot with various tribal communities, right? Yeah. So what was that about? So under our constitution, tribes are separate sovereign nations. We, you know, the first and probably worst genocide that's happened in our country before settlers came on the Mayflower, there's 100 million Native Americans living in North America.

Now there's about 1.5 million. So that genocide was really brutal. It led to people being herded into reservations. Those reservations were then given rights. It basically means that tribes don't need to and don't are not subject to state jurisdiction. So in many states, that's why they can have casinos. Those states do have to apply federal environmental laws. So we were basically there to support those sovereign nations.

They had community gardens. They had water treatment systems. So I decided to go and meet with all 135 tribes and go to their— Every single one of them? Every single one. Individually? Individually, yeah. single one of them every single one individually individually yeah so i got in i rented vehicles and crisscrossed over seven years met with all 135 amazing amazing experience um when you think

about resiliency and what it means to be human and to keep a language intact to can to keep a language intact, to keep ceremonies and a sense of self when you're barraged, killed, you know, annihilated by an incoming unfriendly community is incredible to think that in 2018, we still have that. So it was a pretty, it was a profound experience meeting with them. I would imagine delicate as well. You're coming in as a representative of the United States government into territory that is theirs. And without knowing more or who you are specifically, there's going to be a reticence like, oh, this guy's going to come in and tell us what we can and can't do you have to overcome that first of all i had to overcome it personally um because that legacy is hideous and um it isn't a distant history i spoke to i was recently hiking down in the havasupai

reservation and i met with this guy, Clay Bravo, who's a member of the Hualapai tribe. And he was like, his parents were taken to what he called concentration camps 50 years ago. So this isn't like ancient history. So yeah, it felt really weird to be a representative from their perspective and his history, historical perspective of an occupying force

I'm Jewish. So I kind of always thought you know if the Nazis had won That's me knocking on the the Jewish home store right? Well, this is intent so yeah, there's a lot of suspicion which is healthy and warranted and on their part. And, you know, of all the agencies, EPA was the most trusted, had the best relationship with the tribes, I think. There's some other great agencies and then some other less good agencies. So, yes, it was always it was always I never took it for granted that i would be welcome um and you know it took time to build trust and what what are the fruits of those meetings those

encounters like what did that translate into progressive reform or anything like that so i think as a movement um i i certainly don't um take credit for this but as a movement, I certainly don't take credit for this, but as a movement, what you saw at the Dakota Access Pipeline was a coming together of different tribes. And that hadn't really happened to that extent before. The last time it happened was in Alcatraz in 1969 when tribes came together and you had the American Indian movement. So the Dakota Access Pipeline battle, which had a horrible end with Trump, but the positive part of that was really people realizing exactly that cohesion and sense of community and shared destiny amongst different tribes.

Right. So you ultimately decide to part ways with the EPA. You had like seven months left on your term or something like that. Why did you decide to leave? So at the time, I thought that Hillary Clinton would win, as many of us did. And I knew that I didn't want to get reappointed, that I'd done my job. And as I said earlier, I never felt like a bureaucrat, and yet I was becoming one. And so I knew I just needed to kind of get out, and I didn't really know what that escape hatch looked like.

And I didn't really know what that escape hatch looked like. But I'd always dreamed of doing the Pacific Crest Trail that runs from Mexico to Canada. And so when I talked to my wife about doing it, about me doing it, she was like, if you're going to do it, you need to do it this year. In the year that I left, as opposed to after Obama leaves. So I was like, okay. And I did really want to do it. So it was kind of a, for me, a kind of difficult act of just jumping off the precipice and saying, you know what? I'm not, I don't have another job. I don't have anything lined up, but I know that I'm pretty far away from who I used to be and think I still am. So you decide you're going to do this.

I mean, that's a monumental undertaking. I can't begin to understand the intricacies of what it would require to tackle something like that. My main frame of reference is probably like everybody you know the wild book and and the movie that followed but what was it like to prepare for that and and undertake it well i was saying to david earlier um you know ultimately i think i must have been and still kind of harbor this like an accomplishment junkie because why couldn't i have just taken a nice walk in yosemite like why did i need to go and do a listen who do you think they're talking to here like i get it i was like why did rich need to do five iron mans in a row because it had to be done yeah well i'm

not it maybe it did maybe it didn't like yeah it beat the shit out of me to do the pacific crest trail and i know that i needed that I needed to like the baptism by fire. I was kind of in a rut. And I think I judged success according to very narrow parameters. And those parameters told me, you know, an ever, basically that the more scale that you had in a job, if you had more people to help do more good things you would get more good things done and it was a little bit of a myth um that i perpetrated against myself so

i um yeah the main thing i i became a planner so planning planning for the Pacific Crest Trail. So it's 2,600 miles, basically a marathon every day for 100 days. And that requires a lot of logistics around food, especially being vegan. You're not going to get it at a 7-Eleven at a Chevron station, you know, in the middle of nowhere. So you have to send it to yourself. I became pretty much a gearhead. And the goal was to get the gear as light as possible. And how many, like, what are the intervals at which you could mail stuff to yourself to pick up along the way. I had 31. 31 different drops. Yeah. Uh-huh.

So other people had, there are people who did it and had six. If you don't care what you eat. So how many days would you have to pack out for? So that whole planning, it's really bizarre because you don't, you basically have to work out how many miles you're going to walk, and then you can see how far the drop places are between. So for instance, if it's 100 miles apart between A and B, and I'm only walking 10 miles a day,

that would take me 10 days. So then I'd need to pack 10 days of food to get there but you're looking at four or five days maybe yes mm-hmm so you had to have enough that's the amount of food that you had to be able to carry with you at all times yes mm-hmm and so what was the food that you brought so the food that I brought I read this old-school book that was written in the 70s and I kind of very intentionally didn't want to be inundated by other people's adventures. So the book that I read. So you didn't read Wild?

No, I didn't read Wild. I read this book by Ray Jardine called like a guide to the Pacific Crest Trail. He was like the first person that really had done it. And he suggested that I only bring corn pasta which turned out to be a very bad idea one I didn't like corn pasta two the unfortunately the learning experience the first 700 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail is the desert so there's not a lot of water and the water that you cook the pasta in you have to throw away right so it's a complete the worst possible thing so i immediately switched to ramen

which isn't super healthy um i ended up eating like the uh the mountaineering food um backpackers pantry and those kind of foods they actually have some really good vegan options amazingly and my favorite on ended up being pad thai just tastes so good I'd have peanut butter a lot of peanut butter a lot of trail mix that I made for myself that probably was the lifeblood yeah but i and bars look ridiculous number of bars that i then could never eat again they're so right revolting to like just look at them i have a reaction like i can't eat i can barely eat bars anymore for that same reason disgusting yeah so yeah you get to a point, you're just like, please do not show. So there are people who do the Pacific Crest Trail that eat out of the hiker boxes.

So they're these boxes. What does that mean? So at post offices or wherever you get them, there's a box. And you put the stuff that you don't want. So as the trail went on. I see. I put more and more of the bars in. And people were just like, you're throwing those away.

Yeah, right. throwing those away. Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, I probably, I think I ate about two and a half thousand calories a day and I burnt about five and a half. So you must have dropped quite a bit of weight. Yeah. Wow. And so you'd have to bring five days of water with you. you you get the water as you go oh you do you take it from the streams you take it from horse troughs whatever's

there you clean it yeah amazing there's a thing called a soya filter the filter thing yeah incredible about that i mean right this thing is revolutionized it it weighs maybe three ounces and you have a little plastic bag you collect the water and then you squeeze it into your bottle right so all told this took you how long it took me um a month and five days uh four months and five days a month oh my god yeah no that would be a world record i didn't know that you were like running you know three hour marathons every day yeah um wow and and i have sort of two things i want to know the first thing is the obvious question which is you know what was the hardest part or did you have a breaking point with it or did you you know have any kind of

you know have any kind of hair raising you know scenarios that arose every day i had both yeah i mean like just to know that the it was an emotional much more emotional roller coaster than a physical one so the physical stuff really happened in the first two weeks so your feet you're getting used to it my feet went from a size 10 to a size 11. They'll never go back. And unfortunately, like the shoe sizes. So I lost toenails and all kinds of stuff. But really, after two weeks, you're pretty good physically, unless you have joint issues, which a lot of people did. But I was very fortunate not to have those. of people did but i was very fortunate not to have those so the main the main thing is that you know our brains have this homing device and we're not used to being away in in wilderness

and so it was a challenge every day every day at around five o'clock, I was just like, I want to fucking go home. I hate this. And it was mainly around food. Yeah. Food becomes was my, the thing I thought about the most, the biggest distraction. It wasn't missing family. It wasn't, I wish it was, I wish I could say, yeah, I just miss my kids and wife so much. I do love them, but I didn't miss them on the trail i missed food like yeah i wanted scrambled eggs i wanted french toast um and i wanted pancakes with blueberries and i could eat like like when the pct hikers come to town to these teeny little towns um where we got the resupply so you'd i didn't i'm not sure how i missed this rich but so you have 31 drops and most of them are about 10 miles from the trail. So you have to hitchhike.

I didn't know that. Yeah, I did like 62 hitches and in very, very, very rural parts of the state, of the three states, California, Oregon, and Washington, and universally the nicest people. I never waited more than 10 minutes. I'm sure they're used to it because everyone's doing that all the time there. Yeah. It was still really. But aren't you in towns where you could go to a restaurant? Yeah.

So you could like. Yeah, but that's every seven days. Right. Yeah. So that's when I would. But then the rest of the time that you just dream of the next time you're going to eat food. But what about contending with weather and wild animals and all of that? It was all fine?

So the worst weather was in Washington and in Southern California. So I'm just not used to dealing with 110-degree heat. So I had an umbrella, a uv umbrella that for me was a lifesaver if there's one piece of equipment other than you know my shoes and and um the usual things umbrella and walking sticks so did you you hold an umbrella or did it attach to your head neither so i kind of jerry-rigged it into the breast pocket on my, I had a shirt with a breast pocket on the right. And then I pulled the backpack, the top backpack strap over it. So I kind of kept it in place. You had a canopy over yourself. Yeah. But anyone who's hiking in the

desert, there was the number one issue of i i saw maybe five or six helicopter rescues was all from being overexposed to the sun and dehydration so when you're out there it's serious the sun is so powerful places like the mojave desert you need an umbrella yeah uh no mountain lions or anything like that yeah they're all kind of a lot of rattlesnakes, bears, coyotes, a few mountain lions. But, you know, they generally want to leave you alone. Yeah. Well, on a bigger issue, I think I'm interested in hearing a little bit about what it's like to spend that much time alone, like the self-reflection, like especially you being at this point in your life where you've left this one career, you're trying to figure out what you want to do with yourself next. Like how did that

rumination like kind of impact your life and sense of self? I mean, at first I thought I was going crazy because there's all these voices in my head and you've i felt completely schizophrenic i had like the the jared i thought was normal jared and then i had like teenage jared and you know i had like 15 voices in my head the first week and i was like oh my god I'm never gonna make it through because you're spending all this time by yourself and my only practice was to work out what I was thinking about and they they would go on in loops so I'd be thinking about just the most bizarre shit like um you know things that I I would never think I thought about and wouldn't want to admit to like my competitive side like am I walking more miles than the person I started with and like that that

was kind of an early obsession like how many miles am I doing you know you get given a trail name what's my trail name going to be and they all revolved early on in the hike around like how strangers saw me and i thought of myself as someone that didn't give a shit about what other people thought and i suddenly realized i care a lot about what people think and these aren't people i know these are just random people and i'm thinking about it all day long right why so i had to answer that question kind of so that's how i kind of proceeded on the hike is i would work out what the hell i was thinking about because it would just be driving me bonkers and then i try and analyze why i thought about it. And so, like, I realized that, you know,

I spent a lot of time thinking about expectations, guilt, and disappointment, and how expectations are kind of the parent of both guilt and disappointment. And I got to this place where I realized, you know, society has very strong expectations of us. We have expectations of ourselves. And they're generally unspoken and different from a goal or an ambition. They're the things that we don't check in again regularly with ourselves and say, am I equipped to even meet this expectation? You know, do i want to is this something that i care about or is it

just something that a tv commercial thinks i should care about and so you know i realize that for me it sounds kind of bizarre but like in order to get to my true nature i could only do it in nature and and nature is very very non-judgmental but at the same time brutal right it doesn't give a shit about death nature does not care about my whining doesn't care about where the next water is it just is so as a partner walking with nature um yeah it was um tough at the beginning really, it kind of broke me. And I needed, frankly, I don't know if this is similar for you, but I just, I didn't, I would never have admitted this to myself,

but I needed to be broken. I needed to reach that breaking point where I was just desperate. And then I needed to keep going. Because basically, I think my issue Psychologically neurotically was I was afraid of being abandoned Right and what you realize by being in nature is that you're gonna be okay I'm completely by myself with nothing and I'm fine. I'm fine and that teacher taught me that that was kind of like a

Childhood. Yeah in childhood you can be abandoned because you need other people's help, but now I'm actually going to be fine. So that, that was like lesson number one. Yeah, that's profound. I mean, I think the idea is almost like you're on this four month silent meditation retreat, right? And, and initially the looping, you looping patterns of the thinking brain are attacking you because you're so acclimated to living however you were living and ultimately creating some awareness around that and becoming the observer of that and engaging with it

on a subject specific matter to get to a point where you then kind of graduate to a greater awareness of your pitfalls and your hangups, et cetera, to kind of culminate in a more meta perspective of what's important and what's not. It's beautiful. It's like this sort of compacted hero's journey. Yeah. It felt like Survivor designed by either jung or freud i was like what the fuck i didn't sign up for this rich yeah but you did i did but not unconsciously or not like this is what you wanted right you were seeking this like and on some level perhaps you needed it you're at a crossroads in your life and there was something beckoning you to do this and you had to

know that that this was going to be part of the deal, right? That you were going to be meeting your maker, so to speak, along the way. And that's part of the allure as much as it is, you know, the fear that surrounds doing something like that. I wish I could say that that was true. I think I was so fucking oblivious to where I was at and so numb and frankly just cynical that I don't think I was self-aware enough to realize what it was that I was engaged in. And somehow I think there was a deeper level that must have known that. Yeah, there must have been a compulsion to at least cultivate a deeper level of self-awareness. Well, I knew I didn't feel comfortable in my own skin.

I didn't feel comfortable being the person I was. And I knew that I needed to go through some kind of cathartic process. I thought it would be physical so that that's kind of that's the part that surprised me is that i thought you know and i i looked at everything um i did had these little matrix matrices that i gauge different aspects of the walk along just because you have nothing else to do apart from make this shit up so one of them um one of them was around for instance journey versus destination am i thinking about getting to the next food or am i actually present right now um another was physical mental and i think i thought it would be about 80 physical

20 mental and it was completely the opposite yeah it was definitely 80% mental and um it definitely tested me and I hadn't done meditation um before and the meditation practice that I do now really is to get me back to the peace and being present that I felt on the hike. And really it's like ready-made being present, like just add nature and you get present because it is so grounding. You know, just sleeping outdoors every day, seeing the stars, breathing the air. I mean, it gets back to the earlier point of that's where we come from. We are part of nature. Nature is part of us. That was kind of the epiphany I had was really around if we had a creation, if we created a creation myth, it would be very different now than it is in the Bibles that we read. And it would be about actually facts.

And the facts are, you know, 11 and a half billion years ago, there was an infinitesimally dense atom that expanded and created time and space. And so Stardust is in us and we are in Stardust. We are all part of this same endeavor, which is life and the universe. That's beautifully put. I like that. So armed with that, when you return, how do you then reframe your life and figure out what the next chapter is for you? What about that experience then colored the decisions that you've made about what you're going to do next

it was really really really hard coming back much harder than the acclimatization process of going from civilization to nature going from nature i'd be really fascinated i've talked to other people who've done these long distance hikes and none of them have really ever acclimatized back. I've done a lot of more hiking since. Because so if you imagine the process is we experience the world through our five senses. That's it. That is the reality we call reality is only through our five senses. And in nature, you are allowed to open up your senses.

So the most shocking one was smell because smell is so beautiful and natural and harmonious. And it's like a blanket. You go from one smell to another. Whereas in cities, the smell is really nasty and the same is true of sound so here it's very quiet but i live right in the middle of the city and so so in nature i'd opened up all my senses that was the progress i'd made is to allow myself to be vulnerable and open up the senses the The city required me to shut it all down. And I didn't want to shut it down.

And so I'd get headaches from the sirens and the noise and the smell. And it's really bright, the lights at night. Almost like a synesthesia. Yeah. Wow. So it was really, and I don't think I still recovered. And I'm not sure I want to fully recovered because living in a manufactured we live in a manufactured environment I don't want to be in a I realized

from the hike I never want to rush again I don't want to be in a rush like life is here to savor and I don't want to be in a place where I'm you know in, in a building where the air is piped in, where I'm looking at a screen all day. I don't want my relationship with this precious life to be through a computer, an object. So yeah, it has taken me remarkably longer than I ever would have imagined. I actually hired a, I love life coaches and I hired a coach to help me when I got back. Think about, I want to do my job now. I want to do the next job. And three months into it, her name was Mona. She was like, Jared, have you ever thought about the fact you might just not be ready? And I was like, yeah, I'm not ready.

I'm absolutely not ready. So I spent- Meanwhile, your wife's like, yeah, I'm not ready. I'm absolutely not ready. So I spent. Meanwhile, your wife's like, well, all right. So what are we doing here? What's going on? So what we're doing is spending my 401k. So I spent like. Don't worry. Yeah.

No, I've spent it all. I have like 75 grand left in my 401k and it will all go. I'm sure. And, you know, Oscar wilde said that youth is wasted on the young while retirement is wasted on the old so my retirement savings would be wasted on the old so i was like yeah so for all of you those those people who are out there like how the fuck you just can't do this yeah you can yeah you can absolutely do it you just there's some sacrifices and trade-offs and i love getting those checks from prudential i'm like i didn't even know i

had this money now i can use it so so um yeah well what i love about that is that you didn't technically experience some kind of crazy um you know, life crisis or even professional crisis, like you seem to have been fulfilled in what you were doing professionally. It's not like, oh my God, you know, my life is going down the tubes. I need to like hit pause now. Like it was, you know, you were on a trajectory that was good, that you were enjoying, and yet you still had the awareness to recognize, like, I need to take a break here and connect in a different way in order to really understand myself well enough to figure out what the next couple decades are going to look like. I was pretty lost. I was fulfilled. I loved doing the work at EPA. But at the same time, I mean, how can we do

these jobs of protecting the environment that we care and love with never being in the environment that we care and love? So I felt really detached and unconnected from this world. It becomes an academic enterprise, despite the fact you were this boots on the ground guy like from what i understand your predecessor wasn't doing that kind of stuff like showing up actually on all these at all these sites yeah i mean i love i i'm going to bring that emphasis and and i wanted to meet the people i wanted to see the places but even even that it it um yeah i definitely felt um the the cynicism part and the calcification and the numbness to life definitely felt very tangible and um and just being judgmental and it felt very heavy. Like the biggest, before I left on the trail,

the biggest kind of thing that I looked at was the difference between letting go and holding on. So with nearly anything that you look at in life, you could put it through that lens. And, you know, was whole i was like white knuckling it and holding on so tight um and even to the people that we love i think we have this concept that if we hold them they'll stay but really what we do is suffocate them so i just i came to a place where i was like i just need to let go and just be happy free-falling and actually I did jump out of a plane it was terrifying um but no but literally just allow

myself and that's what the Pacific Crest Trail did for me was just allow me to get back to a place where I was realizing this is who Jared is and really the epiphany is this is my life and I'm living it and a lot of times I realized looking back I couldn't say yes to both those things sometimes it didn't feel like my life and I wasn't always sure that I was living it so now that's basically the mantra that I live by is like, this is my life, and I want to live it. And you've been able to hang on to that. Yes. Sensibility.

I'm never going to let go of that. That's cool. That's cool. And you've started a podcast. I have. See, there's one thing that you've done. I've done a few things. Yeah, like, well, you have this consulting practice now, right? I still have that, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. there's there's one thing that you've done i've done i've done a few things yeah like well you

have this consulting practice now right that yes um so but that both of those again were just kind of letting the universe you know being receptive to things that felt close to my heart and you know so for instance the the consulting thing with people that had so for instance there's this guy who wants to um you can you can you'd like this guy he um he wants to stop microfibers from like patagonia and other kind of fleeces he's come up with a device that you could put in washing machines. And it basically would be like a lint trap for microfibers. So cool idea. And he wants me to help him. Like, how do we make this into a statewide initiative? So those are the kind of things that I love doing. Or how do you ban straws? When people come to me and say,

we'd like to pay you to do that. I'm like, love to do that that's fun and the podcast came through my cousin David just saying Jared no one's really talking about environmental issues and to a large extent everyone's talking about environmental issues because the world around us is is a big sphere but like i like exploring these issues and as you know i spent a huge amount of time by myself and so for me getting to to talk to people and be in conversation and experience their wisdom is a gift i love doing it so when someone said you could actually do this like hanging out talking with you I there's nothing I'd rather be doing this is so

Cool. Yeah, it's cool. It's cool. And we were talking before the before the we hit record, you know I don't know that anybody. Yeah, we all kind of generally talk about the environment But there's nobody with your experience and pedigree who's doing an actual podcast around these ideas. And these are ideas that can be spoken about both broadly and very specifically. And you're sort of the perfect cipher for those kinds of conversations. So I think it's cool. It's called PodShip Earth. PodShip Earth.

So PodShip Earth came from Buckminster Fuller's book, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. And I had this wacky great uncle called Milton who late in life, you know, he was a jock. He was not a reader. I'm not sure what happened, but like in his mid-80s, he discovered Buckminster Fuller. And he, unlike me, he didn't do the Pacific Crest Trail

But he turned his savings in as a meager as they were and bought hundreds of copies of Bucky's book called critical path and what you're gonna say he bought a dome. I wish you know, unfortunately, he kind of Ended up in really seedy motels in Miami Beach. But no, he should have moved. That's a different story. He should have bought a dome. He would have been much, much happier in a geodesic dome.

But he did buy hundreds of copies of the book. And he handed me one. And my memory at the time was like, what the fuck? He used to give me $100 bills for Christmas. And now I'm getting a critical path by Buckminster Fuller. But I eventually got around to reading it and had a big impact on kind of systems thinking. And so I was like, pod, spaceship earth, podship earth.

So we are this teeny little dot. My kids, I'd invite every single listener to look up there's um a youtube video of this guy talking about the virgo um super cluster which our galaxy is in and when you see the scale of the galaxy that we're in and then this virgo super cluster we are a teeny little spaceship with is it that one that that starts with the earth and then slowly progressively zooms out? Yeah, I've seen that. I love that. I'll put a link in the show notes.

It is pretty cool. That's cool. That's awesome, man. So the first episode drops late February. February 19th. It's going to have Gina McCarthy. She was my boss at EPA. She was the head of EPA.

She's now at the Kennedy School. She's been her whole life a fighter. She was ridiculously optimistic about our prospects of turning this around, which I liked. I'm looking for optimism. That's cool. Good. All right. Well, we got to wrap this up, but I don't want to let you go without two remaining questions. The first is, if people are listening and they're inspired to get more environmentally conscious and active in their own lives, what are some of the most impactful things that the average consumer can put into motion? The most important thing is yourself and your family. That's the most important unit we have. And then your community. But within your family, little things like, you know, being

consumer minded, environmentally minded when it comes to choices. I was helping my son buy a pillow the other day. You don't want a pillow with brominated flame retardants. You want a pillow that's made out of organic things. You're putting your head on it. When it comes to, you know, getting chocolate, if it has fair trade, why not get the fair trade one? You know that it's coming from a place where there's not slave labor used in the chocolate. When it comes to making a decision about buying a case of plastic bottles for your kid's soccer game, or maybe buying five or six stainless steel bottles that can be refilled, make the smart choice. Those things will last forever. Even just kids' birthday parties or your own birthday parties, those styrofoam plates,

it's so much classier and nicer to use actual ceramics and cutlery. People love it. So like enjoy life, but be conscious that you can really make some pretty profound choices. You can put solar on your roof. You can decide, you know what? I'm not gonna go to the gym.

I don't have the money, but I live five miles away from where I work. I'm going to walk every day. You will be amazed. I walked every day and it was so eye-opening. I got to know people on the street. I got a lot fitter and I didn't have to be cooped up in a car, which, you know, the air is bad, you get stressed. So if you choose a life that is simple and honest to your values, and that really just means looking after your health and your health of your family, the next thing is your community. Things like tree plantings, community gardens, the whole focus on public policy and the things that really, I don't think matter quite as much

as the individual action at the local level. So I would say act locally, resist nationally. I like that. But on the subject of policy, and this leads me to my final question, if you did find yourself in some parallel universe where you had been appointed to run the EPA and you're in Washington in your nice office, what do you do first? What is the policy agenda look like if you were in charge? So we kind of know what the policies need to be in order to get out of the mess that we're in. They need to be in order to get out of the mess that we're in. They need to be driven by science. So with climate change, there's already a finding that greenhouse gases are a pollutant. It's called the endangerment finding. That can't be changed because the science hasn't changed. So

really let science be our guide. And then secondly, the laws are pretty clear that we need to protect human health and the environment let's do that so with climate change we had a common sense plan called the clean power plan that was in place we got four and a half million public comments now they're saying there probably wasn't enough public comment i mean so yeah there's a lot of public comment it was a great plan. The energy companies bought into it and realized they needed certainty. So moving very quickly to renewable energy. And in some cases, I think the state of California can have a goal of 100% renewable energy. Cities need to move in that direction. So energy is move as fast. And now it's, you know, from a fiscal perspective, we have an obligation to do it because it's cheaper.

With water, there's a huge amount of savings. We're going to get into another drought in the West, no doubt soon. We need to think about the whole system of turning wastewater into water that can be used for other purposes from irrigation to washing our laundry. So water is really important. Chemicals, there's 80,000 chemicals in place that have no regulation whatsoever. We need to drastically reduce the number of chemicals that are allowed into our environment until we know what the hell it is they're going to do. We need to make sure that communities of color and low-income communities aren't left behind, that they aren't the, you know,

bearing the brunt of the pollution that makes our lives easier. And, you know, we need as quick an acceleration towards policies like organic agriculture, you know, the subsidies have been helping large-scale commercial petrochemical ag for a long time. So we need to get government's money, which you and I pay, all of us pay. We pay taxes. Those taxes need to go towards doing the right thing as opposed to continually paying for the polluters. Yeah, I agree with that wholeheartedly. If we could shift some of the focus away from farm bill type legislation towards incentivizing the organic farming community and the local farming communities, I think that would be a step in the right direction.

I have a question for you. So I had a difficult time readjusting you're sleeping in a tent yeah so i'm jealous like tell me well you can sleep in a tent i could it's hard in san francisco we have a backyard no no i was thinking the roof yeah we have a flat roof yeah yeah so well my tent was on the flat roof but the wind was crazy lately. So I moved it down to ground level. But yeah, I've been sleeping in a roof in a tent for about a year and a half. Before that, kind of periodically on and off. And I love it.

You know, I love it. It was motivated initially by struggles with sleep that I was having. And I like it cold. Like the colder, the better, get under a bunch of blankets and I just sleep phenomenally well. And my wife likes it warm. And so we would argue, people are like,

is your marriage okay? But it's like, it's actually better now because she gets it the way she likes it and I get it the way I like it. And I can't do anything if I don't sleep well. And so A, my sleep quality improved like tenfold. Like, I don't know how you were sleeping on the trail, but just being in the open air.

Yeah, it's amazing. And I love it for that alone. But I also think it speaks to, I have it right adjacent to this container space out there that I have my office. And like my little world is like that tent and that container. And I happen to live in a beautiful home

and I'm extremely grateful and lucky. And I have, my life is an embarrassment of riches, but on some level, it's sort of a, it's a practice in stoicism because if everything went to shit and I lost everything, like I'm cool. Like I, it's reframed my relationship with the material world in a way that allows me to really embrace and understand, like, I don't need that much.

And my happiness and sense of self is not dictated by those externalities. And then I was doing it for a while, and then I wasn't saying anything publicly about it. I'm like, well, what would people think? They're going to think I'm a weirdo. And then I'm like, I don't care. Yeah. You know, I don't care.

I love it. Think whatever you want to think. But, you know, I like it and it's been a cool thing. So put that tent on your roof. I like it. Just final point. I have never been happier than when I was on the Pacific Crest Trail and I had everything that I needed in my backpack. Right. Yeah. when I was on the Pacific Crest Trail and I had everything that I needed in my backpack.

Right. Yeah. So happiness is not a function of the material possessions that you lug around with you. It's more a function of the experience that you choose to bring into your life and the people that you surround yourself with and your relationship to that environment and those people. Well, thank you so much for inviting me today.

Thank you. It was a pleasure, man. Come back anytime. Good luck with the podcast. Well, I'm going to invite you. I need you as a guest. Happy to come. I don't know what I could say on the environmental issues, but anytime you want to have me.

I want to hear all about your lawyering and how you made the transformation and what you felt like when you did your fifth Ironman in five days. And like, this is a promo for the show. You're going to, you've already heard it because he's talked about it on this show. Yeah. Cool, man. All right. Well, awesome. So if people want to connect with you or hook up with you, what's, where's the best place for them to do that? Podshipearth.com. Yeah. All right. The new website. Awesome. And subscribe on iTunes, check it out, all that kind of stuff. All right, Jared. Thank you. Peace. Yeah. All right. We did it. It's over. It's for me. It's complete. How did it go for you?

I felt like we knocked that one out pretty good. I enjoyed it. I hope you did too. Be sure to check out the show notes at richroll.com for plenty of additional links and resources to expand your experience of this conversation beyond the earbuds. And do me a personal favor and give Jared's brand new podcast, Pod Ship Earth, a listen with open ears and open heart and open mind. Again, Plant Power Away Italia is available now for pre-order. So reserve your copy today. It would mean a lot to me. And if you would like to support my work, please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts

or on whatever platform you enjoy this content. It only takes a second, but it really does help us out significantly with show visibility and reach and audience and all that kind of good stuff. You can also support the show on Patreon at richroll.com forward slash donate. If you need help with your diet and nutrition, I highly suggest and recommend you check out our meal planner. It's got thousands of custom tailored plant-based recipes, grocery lists, even grocery delivery in almost every US metropolitan area.

Everything you need right at your fingertips so that you can eat the way that you deserve for just $1.90 a week when you sign up for a year. To learn more, go to meals.richroll.com or simply click on Meal Planner on the top menu at richroll.com. Thank you to everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, interstitial music.

Also, you can catch Jason in a Super Bowl commercial that he did with Alice Cooper. I'm gonna put a link in the show notes to that. You guys should check that out. I forgot to mention that the other day. It's pretty great. He plays a drummer. He's all kitted out looking like a heavy metal dude.

It's pretty awesome. Also Sean Patterson for help on graphics, Michael Gibson for videoing today's podcast, which you can enjoy on YouTube, youtube.com forward slash rich roll. Please give me a subscribe there as well. And theme music as always by Anna Lemma. Thanks for the love you guys.

Perhaps you will think a little bit more deeply, a little bit more profoundly and meaningfully into your impact on planet earth and perhaps change a few behaviors here and there. Just little things that you can do to help you walk a little bit more gracefully on our precious planet. And I'll see you guys back here soon. Peace plants. Namaste. Thank you.